Original poetry, essays, and cultural reflections.
Charles de Foulcauld, Writings Selected with an Introduction by Robert Ellsberg. Charles De Foucauld (1858-1916) was born into a French aristocratic family. As a student he was affable, agnostic, lazy, pudgy, and gluttonous. He surprised everyone with his success as…
A thousand years ago when I was a young man, I read Madame Bovary, Salammbo, and A Sentimental Journey. But it was not until I picked up Three Tales a few days ago that I remembered how truly great writer Gustave…
Thomas Merton (1915-1968) was a unique literary figure in the 20th century — perhaps so over a much longer span of time. A young man of letters living in New York City with a promising future as a poet and…
Resurrection, published in 1899, was Tolstoy’s last novel and the cause of his being excommunicated from the Russian Orthodox Church. It’s powerful and depressing and thought-provoking in the extreme. Resurrection fully embodies Tolstoy’s method of writing after his religious awakening;…
One cannot read Christopher Dawson’s The Crisis of Western Education without feeling a tremendous sense of loss – the loss of purpose, the loss of a full life, the loss of the future. I’ll quote Dawson at length here, because…